


nu kyr'adyc

by bonebo



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Child Death, Death, Gen, Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-28 08:04:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10827192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonebo/pseuds/bonebo
Summary: The Commander of Blackwatch has his dreams shredded to pieces by gunfire.It’s the sharp chatter that wakes him up from his nap, theratta-tat-tatechoing through the halls of the Swiss HQ; he’s on his feet before he’s awake, carrying a weight that his hands know as his shotgun as he rushes out of his office. The alarm is sounded by the time he’s closed the door.





	nu kyr'adyc

The Commander of Blackwatch has his dreams shredded to pieces by gunfire.

It’s the sharp chatter that wakes him up from his nap, the _ratta-tat-tat_ echoing through the halls of the Swiss HQ; he’s on his feet before he’s awake, carrying a weight that his hands know as his shotgun as he rushes out of his office. The alarm is sounded by the time he’s closed the door.

It takes ten steps to find a body--one of Angela’s interns, slumped against the wall with crimson bleeding into the blue of her uniform, her pistol untouched, safe and useless, in the holster at her hip. Gabriel checks her pulse despite knowing she’s dead--because he’s running purely on training right now, mind racing ahead seven steps to set up a plan for being in a base with an unknown amount of hostiles and at least seventeen potential victims--and it’s as he’s tallying those potential corpses that his brain zeroes in on the two most important.

Fareeha, eleven years old and so brave, already showing hints of her mother’s talents with a weapon. 

Jesse, plucked out of the desert just shy of six months ago and quickly establishing himself as a trustworthy member of their family.

Both of them in his office, before--Fareeha with her arms locked around Jesse’s scrawny shoulders, the gap in her teeth plain as she smiled, and Jesse’s voice confident as ever, _“Boss, you look drop-dead tired. Take a break and let me watch her, we won’t get up to no trouble, I swear.”_

It’s a good memory of them. But Gabriel can’t stand the thought of it being his last.

He runs blind, heading for the common room--it’s where the video consoles are they play on are, where Gabriel first found the two asleep on the couch, Fareeha with her head pillowed on Jesse’s chest and Jesse’s melatonin nowhere to be found. It’s on the way there that he runs into two men dressed in black and grey, rifles up and ready; and Gabriel sees a red more vivid than their visors as he makes them taste Hellfire’s bite.

By the time they hit the ground with gaping, raw holes where their skulls used to be whole, Gabriel is gone.

_They’re going to be fine. They’re going to be fine._

The mantra is frantic and does nothing to quell his fear. Gabriel turns the corner into the common room, and a lifetime of abuse--the experiments and concoctions of the SEP, the horrors of a cruel battlefield, the injuries doled out by machines made to kill--is not enough, nowhere near enough, to prepare him for what he finds.

Jesse’s body looks lanky, too-long, stretched out the way it is; he’s face-down and his hat is gone, not there to hide the blood drying in tacky clumps in his hair, crimson bloomed across the back of his skull. His right arm is outstretched, Peacekeeper just barely held within his fingertips--and Gabriel’s desperate search for Fareeha ends with an anguished cry, when he sees a shock of jet-black hair, peeking out from the junction of Jesse’s left arm.

Ever the protector, even when it cost him his life.

“F-Fareeha?” Gabriel’s voice quakes, thick with emotion, with an unsaid plea to whatever god will listen; and he turns Jesse’s body over--agonizes over the warmth still held in his paling skin, _if only he had been awake_ \--and finds her, curled up like she’s asleep, with darkness and gore spattered over the pale blue of her dress. “Fareeha, no… _n-no_ , no, nonono…!”

She’s limp in his grasp when he cradles her against him, her forehead cool when held against his own; and if the pain of Jesse’s death is enough to bring Gabriel crashing to his knees, then Fareeha’s slack, peaceful face, her glassy dark eyes, are enough to pull a cry of anguish from somewhere behind his heart, from the very core of his being.

He cries over them both, his not-children, the little bodies that, somehow, had taken such a big piece of him; and he sees them in his dreams years later, Jesse’s bright grin and Fareeha’s beautiful eyes, hears them like they were real again.

_“We won’t get up to no trouble, I swear.”_


End file.
